Organizer: Sari Kawana, University of Massachusetts Boston

Chair: Sari Kawana, University of Massachusetts Boston

Discussant: Richard Rubinger, Indiana University

The overarching goal of this panel is to examine cultural forces that shaped book production and consumption in early modern to contemporary Japan that are not often considered in traditional literary studies. Papers by Kern and Abel shed new light on access to authorial intentions in various phases of book production. Using the example of Santô Kyôden, Kern examines how this popular literature writer developed his image as a brand. Abel’s study of postwar existentialist novelist Ôoka Shôhei examines the author’s published and unpublished material (at various stages of completion) and provides insight into authorial and editorial strategies under Occupation-era censorship and self-censorship. While the first two papers deal with issues during the age of state censorship (Tokugawa rule and the Allied Occupation), Kawana and Goodman’s studies examine how the financial constraints – pursuit of profit - worked as an insidious force that often overrides artistic integrity in the relative political freedom of postwar Japan. Kawana considers how Kadokawa Haruki was able to create new bestsellers out of prewar texts through an intense advertising campaign that combined book production with that of cinema and music in the 1970s. Goodman investigates connections between the publication of yudayabon [anti-Semitic books], contemporary avant-garde theater, and the overall publishing industry, and how they all raise concern for an erasure of ethical and intellectual integrity in the pursuit of financial gain in the 1980s. Rubinger will conclude by contextualizing the papers within a broad discussion of book consumption and the conditions of reading.

Adam L. Kern, Harvard University

This talk explores how Santô Kyôden (1761–1816), arguably one of the most successful authors of Edo’s often humorous pulp fiction (gesaku), developed an authorial imprint within the woodblock-printed comicbook known as the "yellow covers" (kibyôshi).  This imprint consisted of a tongue-in-cheek stance of feigned humility (higeman) in the face of a publisher’s deadline and of a visual image of the writer at his desk, curiously engaged in the act not of writing but of reading. In addition to speculating about what was really at stake in such self-fashioning, this talk also argues that Kyôden’s imprint represents a compelling moment in the literary history of Japan. Although it was not unusual for authors of popular literature to include their pen names within the colophon of a printed work, Kyôden seems to have been one of the earliest authors to systematically link his pseudonym with a cartoon-like picture of a fictional author within that work. In an age and a commercial setting in which publishers typically paid authors only a fraction of the profits—if there were any—Kyôden seems to have been one of the first authors to parlay his popularity, which this talk argues derived from his authorial imprint, to leverage a contract for literary property even before putting pen to paper.

Jonathan Abel, Columbia University

Bold claims that censorship under the United States Occupation forces in Japan encouraged a concomitant self-censorship are difficult to assess, as they seem to be based on an invisible process of text production. But tangible evidence of self-censorship on the part of authors and editors is not entirely inaccessible to the literary researcher. Scarred with insertions and deletions, unpublished manuscripts and galleys offer a gauge for measuring the degree to which literature of the time was preoccupied with "new" and "imported" taboos. This paper examines the early work of Ôoka Shohei in order to rethink postwar reflections on the impact of the Occupation on Japanese literature. Particularly in the first installment of his renowned Furyoki (Record of a P.O.W., 1948), Ôoka, as a soldier-turned-prisoner and prisoner-turned-writer, navigated not only official GHQ censorship, but also a complex of taboos about representing the "former enemy."  As such, Ôoka’s manuscripts, replete with unpublished material, offer a unique laboratory for testing theoretical and critical claims about the Occupation set forth by critics as diverse in opinion as Etô Jun, Katô Norihiro, Karatani Kôjin, Watanabe Naomi, and Komori Yôichi. In short, the manuscripts reveal the dynamic relations between explicit, external censors and latent, internal ones.

Sari Kawana, University of Massachusetts Boston

In 1978, the Ministry of Internal Revenue (Kokuzei chô) published the names of people with the highest income from the previous year. The three highest paid authors were Morimura Seiichi, Yokomizo Seishi, and Matsumono Seichô, who earned six million, four million, and three million yen, respectively. At first glance, it looks like it was simply a good year for detective fiction, now known as suiri shôsetsu [literally "detection fiction"], as these three authors wrote almost exclusively in the genre. However, Morimura and Yokomizo have much more in common: their works Proof of Humanity [Ningen no shômei] and The Village of Eight Tombs [Yatsuhaka mura] were made into movies in the same year as their books were published. Behind their success lurks Kadokawa Haruki, the black sheep of the Kadokawa family and heir apparent to the Kadokawa publishing empire. This presentation examines the way in which Haruki promoted the literary works of Yokomizo Seishi by tying them into cinema adaptations and television ads. The catchy phrase "Watch it [the movie] first or read it [the novel] first?" became that year’s most famous line. I argue that Haruki’s attempt to maximize book sales and boost box office success created a new synergy between the film and publishing industries, revolutionalized methods of bestseller promotion, and ultimately reshaped the image of pocket edition books [bunko] among the Japanese reading public.

David G. Goodman, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In the mid-1980s, numerous antisemitic books known as Yudayabon based on the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion began to circulate in Japan. This essay describes that phenomenon, examines changes in the publishing industry that facilitated it, and relates it to the contemporaneous popularity of a fantastical postmodern theatre that was both an extension and a betrayal of its avant-garde forebears. What the antisemitic fad and the postmodern theatre had in common, the essay will argue, was a shared antinomianism, a sense that prevailing rules of morality and even of time and space no longer applied and could be transgressed with impunity. The essay will suggest that this antinomianism was produced by a number of factors, including a general commodification of culture that suspended moral and aesthetic standards in the pursuit of commercial success.